Brazilians Share Bolsonaro’s Controversial Views — But Partisanship, Not Them, Drove Votes

🔎 What Was investigated

The apparent similarity between Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump on divisive issues led many to label Bolsonaro a “Tropical Trump.” This study asks whether Bolsonaro’s electoral support in 2018 came from voters who held the same controversial views he expressed about democracy, women, and sexual minorities, or whether other forces explained his victory.

📊 How voter beliefs and choices were linked

A survey-based analysis links individual attitudes about democracy, gender, and sexual minorities to reported vote choice in the 2018 election. The analysis also considers standard predictors of vote choice—ideology and party attachments—with particular attention to attitudes toward Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT).

📌 Key findings

• Many Brazilians share Bolsonaro’s ambivalence about democracy and hold attitudes that denigrate women and sexual minorities.
• Despite that overlap, the degree of congruence between Bolsonaro’s own positions and his supporters’ views on these contentious issues played at most a minor role in shaping vote choice.
• Traditional political factors—ideology and partisanship—especially negative attitudes toward the Workers’ Party, largely explain whether a voter supported Bolsonaro.
• These patterns are broadly consistent across gender and racial groups, though white Brazilians appear modestly more likely than Afro-Brazilians to convert shared divisive views into support for Bolsonaro.

💡 Why it matters

The results caution against assuming that the rise of right-wing nationalist leaders always rests on a mass electoral base that mirrors their most controversial beliefs. In Brazil’s 2018 election, partisan and ideological alignments, not primarily attitudinal congruence on democracy or prejudice, were the dominant drivers of support—suggesting that the “Tropical Trump” parallel may overstate how often leaders’ extreme views translate directly into voter choice.